s market

For the first time since October 2012, the iPhone failed to notch a monthly gain in U.S. smartphone market share, standing unchanged at 39% at the end of May, according to comScore. That’s up from 32% a year prior.

Android eked out a minor gain, finishing May with a 52% share of the U.S. smartphone market, up slightly from 51% a year prior.

Despite the relatively flat market share growth, the broader expansion of the U.S. smartphone market means Android still has 17 million more U.S. users than it did a year before. The iPhone picked up 19 million users in the 12-month period.

Windows Phone continues to show no growth in the U.S. market, with only a 3% share. It actually has less users than it did a year ago, and that was before the release of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft’s latest attempt to launch a popular mobile operating system.

Android gained in the U.S. market in March after three months of consecutive declines, increasing its market share slightly to 52%, according to comScore.

That’s still down nearly 2 percentage points from Android’s market share peak in November and is only up 1 percentage point from a year ago.

Rival Apple continues to pick up market share on the back of a strong iPhone 5 release. At the end of March, Apple accounted for 39% of U.S. smartphone users, up from 31% a year ago.

comScore measures market share by installed base, not shipments. It looks at U.S. smartphone subscribers over the age of 13.

Given the healthy growth of the overall smartphone market, however, Android still has 17 million more net users in the U.S. than a year ago. Apple picked up 21 million net users in the same period.

Microsoft‘s Windows Phone 8 operating system has yet to gain traction. Its market share fell slightly to 3% last month, which means it actually shed 200,000 net users in March.

Since its introduction in late October, Windows Phone has only added 400,000 net American users. Nokia is expected to release the Lumia 928 this week in the U.S. market! , which may help Windows Phone a bit, but we don’t see evidence of a turnaround yet.

Meanwhile, the overall U.S. market continues to see robust penetration growth. Smartphone penetration is now 58 percent, a 13 percentage point increase over a year prior, and an acceleration of growth. However, we don’t believe the acceleration is sustainable. Eventually, penetration growth will slow.

It is important to remember that with the rapid emergence of China, the U.S. is no longer as central to the global smartphone market as it previously was.

There are some caveats on this one which we’ll get to, but Apple had a really good holiday quarter compared to its rivals.

comScorereports Apple had 37.8 percent of the U.S. smartphone market for the three months ending in January. Samsung, meanwhile, had 21.4 percent of the market. Apple’s market share was up 3.5 percent compared to the three months ending in October. Samsung was up 1.9 percent.

As for the iOS versus Android market share battle, Apple was 37.8 percent versus 52.3 percent for Android. Apple was up 3.5 percent, while Android was actually down 1.5 percent.

This is good news for Apple, but as we said there are caveats:

Apple does very well in the U.S. It does not do as well elsewhere in the world.

The holiday period was when Apple really launched the iPhone 5. Samsung, meanwhile, was selling the Galaxy S III, an older smartphone model. It only makes sense for Apple to! experie nce a bump in this period.

We’ll see how Apple holds up over the next three to six months as the hype of the iPhone 5 dies off and the hype for the Galaxy S IV cranks into gear.

All that said, considering the Samsung buzz, you would have thought it was killing Apple. These numbers show that Apple can still hold its own.

Samsung may dominate Apple in smartphone market share, but the opposite is true for tablets. Third quarter figures from IDC suggest the tablet market grew by 6.7 percent during those three months, and 49.5 percent since the same period last year. Apple was responsible for over half of the 27.8 million shipments worldwide, but lost a significant amount of market share, dropping to 50.4 percent from 65.5 percent in the second quarter. IDC attributes this to consumers holding off for the iPad mini, but expects some of these procrastinators will choose Android tablets due to the relatively high entry price of $329 for the mini. Samsung was second on the leaderboard, shipping over five million tablets and increasing its market share to 18.4 percent, mainly driven by Galaxy Tab and Note 10.1 sales. Amazon and ASUS also had a solid quarter thanks to the Kindle Fires and Nexus 7, respectively, shipping around 2.5 million tablets a piece. Lenovo’s presence in China meant it closed out the top five, with modest growth from the same period last year. Apple may still be the biggest player in the tablet market thanks to the iPad brand, b! ut with the significant decline in market share this quarter, it seems IDC’s predictions might slowly be coming true.

Mobile almost doubled its share of the U.S. digital ad market through the first six months of the year. According to IAB, U.S. mobile ad revenues were $1.2 billion in the first half of the year and 7 percent of total U.S. digital ad revenues, up from 4 percent a year prior.

Total 2011 U.S. mobile ad revenues were $1.6 billion, according to IAB. Half-year revenues of $596 million were about 38 percent of the year-end total. Holding all else equal, if the U.S. market grew at the same rate this year, 2012 mobile ad revenues would be $3.2 billion.

Distribution: Native apps are distributed through app stores and markets controlled by the owners of the platforms. HTML5 is distributed through the rules of the open web: the link economy.

Monetization: Native apps come with one-click purchase options built into mobile platforms. HTML5 apps will tend to be monetized more through advertising, because payments will be less user-friendly.

Platform power and network effects: Developers have to conform with Apple’s rules. Apple’s market share, meanwhile, creates network effects and lock-in. If and when developers can build excelle! nt iPhone and iPad functionality on the web using HTML5, developers can cut Apple out of the loop. This will reduce the network effects of Apple’s platform.

Functionality: Right now, native apps can do a lot more than HTML5 apps. HTML5 apps will get better, but not as fast as some HTML5 advocates think.

Android and iOS now account for more than 85 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, up from 69 percent a year prior. That is slightly above their combined global market share, which stood at 83 percent at the end of June.

According to ComScore’s latest smartphone market share numbers, Android notched a 0.6 percent increase from the previous month with a slew of big releases, including the SamsungGalaxy S III. Apple’s iOS—the iPhone’s operating system—did it one better, gaining 1 percent, even though its global market share has stumbled as consumers wait for the release of the new iPhone. RIM, meanwhile, fell below a 10 percent share of the U.S. market for the first time.

As of now, there is no third platform on the horizon to break their hold on the market. Windows Phone is basically dead in the water until the next generation of the platform is released, because many current models can’t be upgraded to the new Windows Phone 8 operating system. The other much-talked-about contender, the Amazon phone, is only an idea at this point.

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File this one under the “check back in 10 years” folder. This is a stat that will blow your mind. Apple’s market cap is now bigger than the ENTIRE U.S. retail sector.

Now, I wouldn’t short AAPL in a million years, but these are the sorts of crazy stats that make you think “hmmm, is this really sustainable?” Here’s more via CultofMac & Jim Cramer:

“Add this to your list of things Apple is worth more than. As the Zero Hedgeblog notes, “A company whose value is dependent on the continued success of two key products, now has a larger market capitalization (at $542 billion), than the entire US retail sector (as defined by the S&P 500).” Nuff said.”

It was probably inevitable, but on Tuesday, it became official: the Encyclopaedia Britannica is finally going out of print. The news was confirmed yesterday by Jorge Cauz, president of Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., who told the New York Times that his company has decided to completely abandon print operations, in favor of its online platform. The announcement marks the end of a remarkable 244-year run for Britannica and its leather-bound tomes, which at one point stood as a hallmark of middle class living rooms and libraries. In fact, it’s been barely two decades since the company reached its high water mark, when it sold some 120,000 sets back in 1990. Once the internet came into full bloom, however, Britannica’s sales soon plummeted. In 2010, the publisher sold just 8,000 sets, leaving an additional 4,000 unsold copies to gather dust in a warehouse.

Tuesday’s announcement may mark the end of an era, but Cauz seems to have come to terms with Britannica’s decision, calling it a “rite of passage.” He’s also eager to devote more time to his company’s website, which will look to chip away at Wikipedia‘s market hegemony. Cauz, however, believes the two platforms can (and must) co-exist, because they fill two different roles. “We cannot deal with every single cartoon character, we cannot deal with every love life of every celebrity,” he explained. “But we need to have an alternative where facts really matter. Britannica won’t be able to be as large, but it! will al ways be factually correct.”

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.